Nation: Fashionable Worry

It has become almost fashionable in Washington to worry about the U.S.
balance-of-payments deficit, that longstanding cause of the U.S. gold
outflow. Economists frequently deplore it, businessmen point to it with
alarm, and the Administration itself has put some of its best minds to
work combating it. Thanks to all the fuss, the balance-of-payments
problem may no longer be such a worry. Last week Treasury Under
Secretary Robert V. Roosa told the House Banking and Currency Committee
that the U.S.'s payments deficit in the second quarter of 1962 was very
much smaller than in the first quarter, and that...